Market Reforms in Health Care

March 28, 2011

Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances during the past 40 years. Yet our health care system also has several well-known problems: high costs, significant numbers of people without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency -- and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is not the answer. In an updated second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, R. Glenn Hubbard, John F. Cogan and Daniel P. Kessler detail a better approach, offering fundamental reform alternatives centering on tax changes, insurance market changes, and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid.

The book proposes five specific reforms to improve the ability of markets to create a lower-cost, higher-quality health care system that is responsive to the needs of individuals, including:

Increasing individual involvement.

Deregulating insurance markets and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid.

Improving availability and quality of information.

Enhancing competition.

And reforming the malpractice system.

The authors show that, by promoting cost-conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending.